Protecting children from imbalance and psychological dangers

There is imbalance in our entertainment system and in the process of our maturity, growth, and learning. Once a family brought me their seven or eight-year-old son and said, "This boy is the most obnoxious boy at home and in the neighborhood. He does things that no one can imagine."

I talked with the boy. He said that he liked to watch television three or four hours every day when his parents were not home. By watching three or four hours of television daily, that seven-year-old boy filled his mental and emotional baggage with so many events and unassimilated experiences that he was no longer living in his brain but in the memories of the television programs. He was a grownup before his time. And because he could not digest, analyze, and relate these recordings, he was out of balance. Anyone who is out of balance will do lots of obnoxious things.

Too often people are doing this to their children, leading them to television, movies, and different experiences for which they are not ready. Children must have their childhood. When they are too loaded with crime, terror, and violence, the lessons they learn in the Subtle Worlds will not last too long and will vanish, leaving them to the disturbing currents of life experiences.

Five-year-old children are deeply worried about nuclear fallout, atomic war, and terrorism. How can the best flowers in them flourish under such pressures? You protect little seedlings from winds and other dangers, but you do not protect your children from psychological dangers because it has become almost an impossibility to do so. You pump into their minds everything about their religion, their tradition, their nationality...to such a degree that they can no longer fit into a world community in which there are many religions, traditions, and nationalities as respected as theirs. This is how we create imbalance in their consciousness and in the world society, and then try to solve the problems emerging from such attitudes.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol.1